Crime Traveller: Infinity Buffer
by Romantic Twist
Summary: With Jeff Slade and Nicky Robson missing, Holly Turner risks the Loop of Infinity to time travel back to find out what happened.
1. Chapter 1

It was mid 1998. The London CIB was in an uproar. Detective Jeff Slade had been missing for two days, and Nicky had disappeared overnight. Kate Grisham looked at the letter which had arrived that morning.

Kate Grisham,

By now you must have noticed the disappearance of your young graduate trainee CID officer Nicky Robson. He will be executed in 24 hours if you have not authorised and implemented the release of Prisoner Alex Crouch.

"He's a convicted political multiple arsonist!" said Kate, "We knew he had an organisation backing him, when we put him away, but I never thought they'd go this far. I just don't understand why they didn't mention Jeff in the letter."

"Maybe they're planning to threaten him as well if we don't give in after they've … after the 24 hours," said Maurice.

"We don't know that Slade was taken by the same people," said Holly, with a faint hint of agitation in her voice.

She was already thinking, planning out how to use her time machine to find out who had taken Nicky Robson and where. She had to remember where she had been the night before, and avoid those places after time travelling, in order to avoid meeting her earlier self. She had almost lost the use of the machine altogether, after the crystal (an essential part of the time machine) had burnt out. Then Jeff Slade had taken a fresh crystal from her old boyfriend Stephen Marlowe's time machine. Her boyfriend had not made it back to his machine in time to prevent being caught in the same loop of infinity. He was reliving the same seconds of time again and again. From his perspective, Marlowe probably wasn't even aware of it, if his memory was constantly reset every time he restarted his loop in time.

Holly didn't even wait for the end of the day. Feigning illness combined with her genuine stress over Jeff Slade's disappearance, Holly went home on 'sick' leave, and closed all of the doors of her apartment, which were wired to complete one of the circuits of her time machine when closed. She put on the watch that counted down the time that she had available, as well as neutralizing the machine's loop of infinity effect. The only catch was that she had to arrive back before the time that she time travelled.

Holly set the machine, and four waves of vertical light ran up the four walls of her apartment, as display screens lit up, showing vector grids and other ways of somehow measuring time travel, which were intelligible only to Holly Turner herself. Her father Frederick Turner had pioneered time travel, and gotten caught in the loop of infinity too.

The machine took Holly into the past. She was still in her apartment, but when she looked at her watch, she realised it was now four pm the day before. She would be leaving work at five pm. She remembered which route she usually took out of the building, and would make sure not to be seen (as a time traveller) on that route now. She was unable to drive there, as her car was already there, waiting for her other self to use it to get home. So Holly quickly hailed a taxi and was taken to the London CIB building. Now all she had to do was watch Nicky Robson leave, and follow him until she witnessed his abduction.

She would never be able to prevent the abduction, but she could learn enough to do something about it. Time would not allow her to change history. Jeff Slade had tried a few times, and failed each time. The principle concerned was called the Chronology Protection Hypothesis.

Holly's adventures in time with Jeff had actually proved that time's law of causality was circular, not linear, as far as the periods affected by time travel were concerned. For example, a man called the CIB one morning, complaining that he had just encountered a madman. Shortly afterwards, they learned that he was dead. Later that day Jeff Slade used the time machine without Holly's permission to go back to that morning and investigate the death. While talking to the man, he learned that Jeff himself (while time travelling) was the man referred to as the madman. This aspect of time would always exist, even though real time Jeff had not known that he would time travel at the time when he'd heard the victim describing the madman.

It was a strange concept to get used to. On television shows and in movies, Holly and Jeff had both remembered the idea that the past wasn't affected in the original timeline. That is, a timeline went one way. Then, if someone subsequently time travelled into the past, they could change it, and create a new timeline. Holly and Jeff had discovered that there was only one timeline, which took account of any time travelling activity. As Holly had once said to Jeff, "I WAS the past."

Holly soon reached the building, and saw Nicky drive out in his car. She followed him to his apartment, and waited. It was the middle of the night, before she saw him being led out of his apartment and into the back of a van by armed men. She followed the van at a safe distance, until it reached a warehouse. She stopped, took out a pair of infrared binoculars she'd brought for the occasion, and watched Nicky Robson being led into the warehouse.

"I have to help him, have to make Grisham believe how I know of it," she thought, "But I can't tell them about the machine."

She had once taken a chance on Jeff Slade, welcomed him into her apartment as a friend, and showed him the secrets of time travel. Since then he had repeatedly persuaded her to use her machine to help him solve cases, not by doing detective work, but simply by going back in time to the scene of the crime and watching the crime being committed. He had taken the credit for several arrests, and her machine had needed frequent part replacement. Just when she thought she'd replaced all of the parts that had burnt out since the machine had been built, the crystal had gone too, and she'd been lucky to get another one.

She had never been that enamoured of Jeff Slade. He was large, rugged, violent, unorthodox, selfish in his attempted misuse of time travel, and there was something untrustworthy about him in relationships too. He had told her he was divorced, yet he showed no sign of grief nor of being emotionally damaged. It seemed clear to Holly, that Jeff Slade had just casually discarded his marriage vows. Marriage was a commitment for life, and Jeff and his wife had not honoured that commitment. The last thing Holly wanted was to involve herself with someone who would not be her husband forever, someone who might leave her in a broken state. Too often she had heard divorcees speak not of wife bashing, not of infidelity which would at least have made one party the victim divorcee, but just of 'drifting apart'. This was wrong, and she believed that the institution of marriage was something worth preserving.

There was one man who seemed softer, gentler, more sincere, intelligent, shy and committed to anything he undertook. That man was Nicky. Yet she knew that so many things would probably put him off her. When they had first met, Nicky had been a graduate trainee officer of the CIB. He was 24 now. Holly Turner was 27. Would he really have cared for her, when his handsome youthful features could easily have endeared him to dozens of teenage girls? To make matters worse, she had physically injured him. While time travelling back a few hours to either prevent or solve her Aunt Mary Chandler's murder, Holly had been mistaken for the killer, arrested and locked in the CIB cell block. When Nicky had brought her supper, she had tried to talk him into letting her go, only hinting at her desperate need to be somewhere in a hurry, as a matter of life and death, without mentioning that the somewhere was her apartment time machine. Nicky had wanted to help her, but begun to explain the legal reasons he couldn't, when she had suddenly kneed him in the groin.

He had later passed it off as a mild 'testicular blow'. Yet the guilt had remained with Holly. Nicky knew nothing of the fact that he was really being attacked by the time travelling Holly Turner, rather than the real time one. After that incident, she had lost all hope of ever being asked out by Nicky. Then her life had been further complicated by her corrupt former boyfriend and Jeff Slade competing for her affections. She wondered if either of those men had ever really loved her at all, or had just been interested in using her to facilitate time travel.

There was still one way to save him. Yet she knew it couldn't begin until the next morning. Grisham had not been given any other news or help prior to her announcement of the letter being dropped off at CIB. So Holly couldn't have contacted Grisham in the past.

Holly lived the same night over. She could not return to her apartment, as she was sleeping there at that time. So she spent the night walking the streets of London. She had slept all night in real time, and was not tired. Besides, when she came out in the present again, she would be in exactly the same state of health as when she'd gone in. It would once again be 10:07 in the morning, a little over an hour after hearing Kate Grisham read out the threatening letter.

From a safe distance, she watched her real time self leaving the apartment block and driving off to work. Then she waited until 9:55, and then ran up, and made it back to the machine in time.

Now she had to convince Kate Grisham. There was only one way to do it, without explaining the existence of the time machine. She called Grisham's office.

"Not now Turner, just get your rest," said Grisham, "I've got Maurice out questioning Robson's neighbours, and with you, Robson and Jeff all not here, I'm flat out taking police business calls on these phones."

"But I know where he is," said Holly, "Slade couldn't explain where he's been, and I still haven't seen him in person, but I now know where Nicky was taken."

The words were not a lie. Grisham would assume that Jeff had been kidnapped too, escaped his abductors and called Holly. She gave Grisham the address of the warehouse. Grisham raided the place with a squad of uniformed policemen, freed Nicky and arrested the abductors.

Holly could only pretend to still be sick, or she would raise suspicion.

In the middle of the afternoon, she got a knock on her door, and opened it to Nicky Robson.

"Nicky!" she said, "I'm so glad you're OK."

"I told Grisham I was fine, but she insisted I take the rest of the day off. I wanted to thank you," he said, and brought his hand around from behind his back, to present her with a nicely bunched collection of white roses.

"They're beautiful, but what did I do?"

"You called Grisham, and told her where I was."

"Maybe you should be thanking Slade," said Holly.

"It's an interesting hypothesis," said Nicky, "But I don't believe Slade had anything to do with it. Grisham thought he was kidnapped with me and escaped. I haven't told her otherwise, but the truth is I know he was never involved. He disappeared days before me, and he was last seen with you. So you must have saved me yourself last night. Did you do it by travelling in time?"

"How? Are you serious?"

"I know you've somehow mastered time travel," said Nicky, "And I won't tell anyone. Without it I might not be here now."

She wanted to tell him, far more than she'd ever wanted to tell Jeff Slade.

"Come in, and see for yourself," she said.

She showed him inside, shut the doors, and let him look at the time machine.

"How did you know?" she asked.

"I kept my interest in science a secret, from the moment I made the choice to get into police work instead of science," said Nicky, "But I read papers on time travel theories, and I began to wonder about some of the things that had happened to us. The way Jeff Slade solved cases could only have been done with extraordinary deductive powers … or with time travel."

"So could guessing that about him," said Holly, "What really got you thinking?"

"Well, since I'm pretty sure you must have time travelled back to learn my whereabouts when I was kidnapped, I should come clean with you about everything too," said Nicky, "There was a day when I visited a place where Slade had been and found an unusual watch. I gave it back to you, remember?"

'The day Slade used the machine after I'd told him not to," said Holly.

"I never told you that I examined it closely first. I was sure it was a component of some system of time travel. I began watching both of you closely after that, sometimes even following you and listening into your conversations. I could swear that on some of the occasions I saw you or Slade, you were actually reported to be simultaneously somewhere else. Then one day I heard you say something about having only a few hours until you had to be back at the machine. Does that have anything to do with Slade's going missing?"

"It has everything to do with it," she said, "He took too many risks when we time travelled, cut our returns to the machine too fine. One day we were using the new crystal. It made him overconfident because it was the first piece of the machine that he'd replaced himself, and the most vital piece. We split up while time travelling. I made it back to the machine with fifteen minutes to spare. I waited and waited for Slade, but he never got back. In the end, I had to go back to the real present and avoid the loop of infinity without him. I've left him in a permanent time loop. His memory keeps resetting and living the same five hours over again. To the people he met in the first cycle of the loop, it's always happening for the first time. In his mind it is too, but it's repeating over and over again, a five hour period from days ago, which Slade can't get out of."

"Why not build an infinity buffer?" asked Nicky.


	2. Chapter 2

"A what?" asked Holly

"I just made up the name, but why not slightly alter the machine, so that, from the time traveller's perspective, if they don't get back to the machine before the last second of the relived time period, that second freezes for everyone but the time traveller. The time traveller then walks through frozen time until they get back to the machine. There's no risk of reaching the end of that last second and going into the loop of infinity, because that second can't progress any further, until you are back at the machine."

"Could you do that?" asked Holly, "I've only been maintaining my father's work. I never imagined that would be possible."

"I'm sure I could," said Nicky, "We just have to alter a few of the circuits, if you show me where, and then change one of the settings, and I think we'll be fine."

It took Nicky over a week to complete the work, by coming over to Holly's during the evenings and doing the job after they'd left the CIB for the day.

"There's just one thing," said Holly, "There's no safe way to test this. If you've gotten it wrong, we'll be in the same boat as Slade. I still can't tell Grisham or Maurice what I know about his disappearance."

"Well look at it this way. If it doesn't work, then we'd just get caught in a loop and not be aware of it. If I'd never come up with it, then you'd be facing that risk every time you continued to time travel. If it does work, then you can time travel whenever you like, without taking an all-or-nothing gamble," said Nicky.

"I suppose you're right, but there's no sense in risking both of us. I'll do it."

"I couldn't leave you at the mercy of my handiwork alone."

"Most of it's MY handiwork. So should the risk be."

"What happens to you is a risk to me too, for the same reason I brought you these flowers," said Nicky, "On the most unlikely chance that you are going to get stuck in a loop in the past, I don't want to be in the present and future without you. I want to come to, if I haven't been too…"

"Of course you haven't. You've been so sweet about everything. I wish I'd known how you felt before."

"This visit was my gamble, even though I remembered your address from the time Grisham and I got stuck in the lift, when she wanted to arrest you for your Aunt's murder."

"I still feel bad about what I did to you that day."

"I feel bad about spying on you and Slade, but then I wouldn't do it any other way, even if this machine could take me back and change it."

"It can't. It can never help you change the past, only to be the past and to observe it."

"Oh Holly, I've liked you for so long."

"I felt the same way. You probably thought I was …"

"It's alright."

"… interested in Slade. I suppose I did have a passing interest, but I wished I was younger, so I could be young for you."

"I don't want you to be younger, not even if this machine could make it happen. Those three years just make you even more lovely. I've always thought you were the most beautiful woman of all. I'm sorry that Slade got caught in the loop, but you shouldn't think of it as your fault, and if this works, the loop won't be a problem to anyone else."

She could say nothing at this point. Holly merely smiled at him. After all this time, she had learned that he felt exactly the same way about her.

"Just in case we do face the loop, we should make it the most enjoyable time period to be reliving," he said.

"It couldn't be something we'd be aware of," said Holly, "After all, when I've time travelled, I've always been a later version of myself, with added memories, different thoughts than the other version, and I've been able to occupy a different place at the same time, existing in two versions at once. If the loop victim's memory didn't reset, then they'd exist as an infinite number of versions of themselves, unable to avoid each other. So if this does fail, I'm convinced we'll just have a great time, forget it and then relive it."

"Well, we've been working on this all night. It's just after ten. We could make the test now, or wait until morning."

"It was your addition to the technology. What would you prefer?" asked Holly.

"I've always dreamt of making my first date occur all night, of walking the streets of London while everyone else slept, of enjoying the tranquillity as though time were standing still. It won't be standing still, but it will be reset. Would you like to have tonight on the town, after we've had it asleep first?"

"Sure, why not?" said Holly, as Nicky's far greater capacity for romance began to replace her immediate recollections of her experiences with Slade.

"Could I stay on the couch?" he asked.

"Ever the gentleman. Of course you can," said Holly, and led him into the lounge room and set him up on the couch. She went to her bedroom.

Both of them could hardly sleep, as the anticipation of both courtship and perfectly safe time travelling played on their minds. After over an hour had gone by, Holly heard a noise. Then it stopped. Eventually they both dropped off. Holly awoke first, having slept more soundly in the familiarity of her own bed. She soon woke Nicky and told him that it was 5:30 in the morning.

She activated the time machine and then looked at the resulting display on the watches. She had been working on a replacement watch for Nicky during the nights that he had been modifying the machine to create the Infinity Buffer for anyone wearing a time travel watch synchronized to the time machine.

"It's given us six hours," she whispered, "Six hours from 5:40. So it's now 11:40 last night. At this point I'd usually tell Slade to be back here in 5 ½ hours at the latest, but the whole point of this test is not to make it back in time. Let's aim to be far away and see what happens."

"Why are you whispering?" asked Nicky, whispering himself, as it seemed important to her.

"Don't you realise when and where we are?" asked Holly, "At this time last night, I heard a noise in bed. I've just realised that it's what the machine sounds like from another room. The noise I heard then was us arriving just now. I know my other self won't find us, because she went to sleep, without trying to work out what the noise was. We just shouldn't take a chance on waking your other self, or letting him hear us if he is still awake."

"I think I was at that time," said Nicky.

Holly led him silently out into the street. His car was still there, as it had been while he'd been sleeping the night. They got in, and he drove her around London for a while, and then parked near a nightclub which ran all night disco and bar service. Nicky bought them both orange juices, and then they disco danced together for over an hour.

"Would you like to take a walk?" asked Nicky at last.

They walked around Hyde Park, sat down on a seat and held hands and talked for some time, and later went walking along a bridge over the Thames. They stopped at one of the lamps.

"I always dreamed of doing this with you," said Nicky.

"So I'm the most beautiful woman, am I?" asked Holly.

"I hope you don't think it's trite. I really feel it, and I've always liked your kindness and femininity. Kate Grisham doesn't exhibit it.

"It's not trite at all. I've always had a special soft spot for you too," said Holly, "There's just one thing. When Slade's father was having dinner with us, he told us how he made you take him to where Aldroyd and Gebler were meeting with our team."

"Oh yes, the night that we wrapped up the case where Aldroyd had framed Jeff Slade."

"Well he said you handled him well, talking about your age and your girlfriend."

"I didn't have a girlfriend. I was just making up the first things that came into my head to win his trust."

"I believe you. I never did see you with a girlfriend at any time I've known you."

"I hope I have one now though …Would I be trivializing anything if I … ?"

He was asking to kiss her.

"Slade? No. He'd want me to be happy, and I am, however this loop turns out."

"We might already be on our second cycle, or our hundredth. The moment we started living from 11:40 onwards, we might have been looped back from the previous times we'd done it."

"I guess we'll know at 5:40," said Holly, and moved her face towards him.

Nicky kissed her for several minutes, and then suddenly released her.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Oh, sorry, nothing. I just realised that I'm having my first kiss, with the only girl I've ever loved, and I'm not even doing it in real time. We're both still sleeping on your bed and couch."

"Does that spoil it for you?"

"No. I think it makes it even more special," said Nicky, "We get to be having the sleep we need for work tomorrow, and having a romantic date here over the Thames as well. It's like a fantasy."

Holly recalled all her time trips with Slade. She had seen him point guns at people, steal vehicles, knock people unconscious and even run from his own real time self's unwittingly delivered instructions to pursue him.

Things were so much nicer with Nicky. If this night would be forever looped around for them, she would not have exchanged it for a lifetime in real time without him.

"Where would you like to go now?" asked Nicky.

"I wonder if there's anywhere that sells tea," said Holly.

"Let's walk to the lights and see," said Nicky.

Nicky turned around, and got out of Holly's way, and the two of them stared in amazement, and then looked down at their watches. Both watches were now set at 0:00:01. Eight meters away, a London policeman was frozen in mid stride.

"It worked! We weren't in the loop!" said Nicky.

"I just realised the limitation of testing it at this time of night," said Holly, "If it weren't for him, there might not have been any frozen movements visible to prove it. It must be 5:39 and 59 seconds now."

"We'd better get back," said Nicky, "I'm assuming the machine will let us return to the real timeline from this one even now."

"Let's go," said Holly, who was suddenly very keen to confirm the outcome of their test.

They went back the way they had come, headed for the car. Nicky suggested a quick detour. They went back into the all night disco. There were only four patrons left, two at the bar and two dancing, frozen in mid step with no audible sound of the music, which was frozen in the middle of a note.

They reached the car and got in, but it wouldn't start.

"I can't believe this. Of all times for the car to break down," said Nicky.

"I don't think it has," said Holly, "I should have thought of that. We can't ever get too far away from the machine while time travelling. When time freezes, the vehicles do too. Our clothes aren't affected by the freeze, because they time travelled with us, but we've moved our car. We'll have to walk all the way back."

"It could take hours," said Nicky, "But then it'll only be hours to us. No time will actually pass. Then we'll have to come back for the car in real time."

"No. It won't be here in real time. It couldn't be, because it wasn't here when we began to time travel. When we come out of the machine, we'll find the car parked outside where you left it last night."

"Oh."

"Are you sure we're not stretching your Infinity Buffer to its limit, by taking so long to get back?" asked Holly.

"In theory it should freeze time to the two of us indefinitely, forever, unless we go back to the machine and break the buffer by returning to real time."

"You're brilliant."

"You and your father were the brilliant ones. I just incorporated a safety feature," said Nicky.

For hours and hours they walked and rested, as 5:39:57am remained static to their very eyes.

"From now on, if we use vehicles, we really should try to get back in time," said Holly.

They entered the building and returned to the machine, and went back to real time.

"No loop of infinity. You've done it," said Holly.

"I'm honoured that you could trust me with this."

"I wanted to for a long time, but I didn't expect anyone to believe me. Then Slade went and got himself in trouble on that Silverman case, and I ended up telling him."

"So that's how he got out of trouble. Grisham was all set to kick him out of our department, and then he solved the case. You two went back in time."

"We were the caterers, the fake Mr and Mrs Wilson," said Holly, "I suppose most of my reluctance to use the machine for crime solving came from my fear of the loop of infinity. Then there was the cost of the parts, but they've all been replaced, and should last a long time now. What adventures we'll have together. Though next time you take me out, let's do it in real time."

"I guess I haven't kissed you in real time yet," said Nicky.

"No," said Holly, "I don't think you have."

Nicky took the opportunity, and gently put his arms around her.

Frank (the plainclothes sergeant who had looked after CIB property envelopes and booking of prisoners) applied to fill the vacancy created by Slade's disappearance. Grisham had interrogated the abductors to no avail. They all claimed no knowledge of Jeff Slade, that they had only targeted Nicky Robson. Holly and Nicky kept quiet about Slade's true fate, and the team slowly adjusted to the fact that Slade was not coming back. Grisham believed him to be murdered either by the abductors or some other criminal enemy he had made in the course of his career as a detective.

Grisham saw nothing suspicious in the open romance between Robson and Turner. She knew that Turner had been instrumental in Robson's rescue. If anything, she felt a professional relief at the disappearance of Slade, who had openly defied her orders and recently become even more sure of himself, after a long run of solving the most difficult and challenging cases.

Nicky and Holly continued to use the time machine to work on solving cases, which helped Nicky's career enormously. A year after they had begun dating, Nicky invited them out for an anniversary dinner.

Holly raised her lemonade glass to toast, and Nicky clinked his lightly against it.

"To the Infinity Buffer," said Holly.


End file.
